ATO grants deadline relief for tax professionals

The tax office said more portal downtime is likely in the coming weeks, but relief for key deadlines has been granted for the accounting community.

The ATO will be remitting automatically or not imposing penalties for failure to lodge on time related to the late lodgement of 2015-16 income tax returns and activity statements due to be lodged from December 2016, where they are lodged by 31 August 2017.

These measures will also apply to SMSF annual returns, the ATO confirmed with Accountants Daily.

These arrangements will be put in place automatically, meaning tax practitioners do not need to contact the ATO.

This announcement comes as the ATO’s key portals, including the tax agent and BAS agent portal, experienced further periods of downtime and degraded performance in the first week of July.

Further disruption is on the horizon for professionals, as the ATO grapples with the scope of their digital restoration and improvement work.

“The issues we have encountered with our systems over the past few weeks highlight the sheer size, scale, and complexity of the ATO’s IT environment. We continue to examine the triggers and cause of these issues and this analysis is informing the ongoing remediation work we are undertaking,” a statement from the ATO said.

“While we are doing everything we can to minimise the risk of being exposed to systems incidents in the future and the resulting impact these incidents have on our stakeholders, we do anticipate there may be some further minimal disruption to our services as we continue work to implement the IT improvements identified in the report.”